Ideal Point Estimation in Political Hierarchies: A Framework and an Application to the US Executive Branch

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Acs
Keyword(s):  
Ideal Point ◽  
The United States ◽  
Executive Branch ◽  
Point Estimation ◽  
The Us ◽  
Political Hierarchy ◽  
Public Bureaucracy ◽  
Ideal Points ◽  
Using Data ◽  
The Ideal

Abstract This article develops a procedure for estimating the ideal points of actors in a political hierarchy, such as a public bureaucracy. The procedure is based on a spatial auditing model and is motivated by the idea that while agents within a political hierarchy are typically segregated in different policy fiefdoms, they are bound to a common principal that can scrutinize their policy proposals through selective reviews, or audits. The theoretical model shows how a principal’s decision to audit an agent’s proposal can reveal both actors’ spatial preferences, despite the strategic nature of the interaction. Empirical identification of the ideal points comes from leveraging settings where elections replace principals over time, but not agents. Although the procedure is quite general, I provide an illustration using data on federal regulatory policymaking in the United States and recover ideal point estimates for presidents and agencies across three administrations.

Small Chamber Ideal Point Estimation

2009 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 276-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Peress
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Ideal Point ◽  
Point Estimation ◽  
Multidimensional Space ◽  
Incidental Parameters ◽  
Ideal Points ◽  
Point Estimators ◽  
The Ideal ◽  
Ideal Point Estimation

Ideal point estimation is a topic of central importance in political science. Published work relying on the ideal point estimates of Poole and Rosenthal for the U.S. Congress is too numerous to list. Recent work has applied ideal point estimation to the state legislatures, Latin American chambers, the Supreme Court, and many other chambers. Although most existing ideal point estimators perform well when the number of voters and the number of bills is large, some important applications involve small chambers. We develop an estimator that does not suffer from the incidental parameters problem and, hence, can be used to estimate ideal points in small chambers. Our Monte Carlo experiments show that our estimator offers an improvement over conventional estimators for small chambers. We apply our estimator to estimate the ideal points of Supreme Court justices in a multidimensional space.

scholarly journals Urban Accounting and Welfare

2013 ◽  
Vol 103 (6) ◽  
pp. 2296-2327 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klaus Desmet ◽  
Esteban Rossi-Hansberg
Keyword(s):  
Large Population ◽  
The United States ◽  
Welfare Effects ◽  
City Size ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
The Us ◽  
City Size Distribution ◽  
Using Data ◽  
Main Components ◽  
The City

We use a simple theory of a system of cities to decompose the determinants of the city size distribution into three main components: efficiency, amenities, and frictions. Higher efficiency and better amenities lead to larger cities but also to greater frictions through congestion and other negative effects of agglomeration. Using data on MSAs in the United States, we estimate these city characteristics. Eliminating variation in any of them leads to large population reallocations, but modest welfare effects. We apply the same methodology to Chinese cities and find welfare effects that are many times larger than those in the US. (JEL H71, O18, P25, R11, R23, R41)

scholarly journals FINANCIAL SECTOR INTERCONNECTEDNESS AND MONETARY POLICY TRANSMISSION

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 1074-1101
Author(s):  
Alessandro Barattieri ◽  
Maya Eden ◽  
Dalibor Stevanovic
Keyword(s):  
Monetary Policy ◽  
Vector Autoregression ◽  
The United States ◽  
Structural Vector Autoregression ◽  
Net Worth ◽  
Financial Variables ◽  
Us Economy ◽  
The Us ◽  
Policy Shocks ◽  
Using Data

We present a stylized model that illustrates how interbank trading can reduce the sensitivity of lending to entrepreneurs' net worth, thus affecting the transmission mechanism of monetary policy through the credit channel. We build a model-consistent measure of interconnectedness and document that, in the United States, this measure has increased substantially during the period 1952–2016. Finally, interacting the measure of interconnectedness in a structural vector autoregression and a factor-augmented vector autoregression for the US economy, we find that the impulse responses of several real and financial variables to monetary policy shocks are dampened as interconnectedness increases. We confirm the same result using data from 10 Euro area countries for the period 1999–2016.

The Adverse Consequences of the Politics of Agency Design for Presidential Management in the United States: The Relative Durability of Insulated Agencies

2004 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 377-404 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID E. LEWIS
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Policies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Executive Branch ◽  
Us Congress ◽  
The Us ◽  
Presidential Management ◽  
Agency Design ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Expected Duration

The US Congress has often sought to limit presidential influence over certain public policies by designing agencies that are insulated from presidential control. Whether or not insulated agencies persist over time has important consequences for presidential management. If those agencies that persist over time are also those that are the most immune from presidential direction, this has potentially fatal consequences for the president's ability to manage the executive branch. Modern presidents will preside over a less and less manageable bureaucracy over time. This article explains why agencies insulated from presidential control are more durable than other agencies and shows that they have a significantly higher expected duration than other agencies. The conclusion is that modern American presidents preside over a bureaucracy that is increasingly insulated from their control.

Nonparametric Ideal-Point Estimation and Inference

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Tahk
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Voting Behavior ◽  
Ideal Point ◽  
Point Estimation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Hypothesis Tests ◽  
Consistent Estimation ◽  
Nonparametric Approach ◽  
Ideal Points ◽  
Ideal Point Estimation

Existing approaches to estimating ideal points offer no method for consistent estimation or inference without relying on strong parametric assumptions. In this paper, I introduce a nonparametric approach to ideal-point estimation and inference that goes beyond these limitations. I show that some inferences about the relative positions of two pairs of legislators can be made with minimal assumptions. This information can be combined across different possible choices of the pairs to provide estimates and perform hypothesis tests for all legislators without additional assumptions. I demonstrate the usefulness of these methods in two applications to Supreme Court data, one testing for ideological movement by a single justice and the other testing for multidimensional voting behavior in different decades.

scholarly journals Measuring Judicial Ideal Points in New Democracies: The Case of the Philippines

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucia Dalla Pellegrina ◽  
Laarni Escresa ◽  
Nuno Garoupa
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Judicial Politics ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Interesting Case ◽  
Presidential Appointments ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The Us ◽  
Ideal Points ◽  
The Empirical Analysis ◽  
The Ideal

AbstractThis paper extends the empirical analysis on the determinants of judicial behaviour by measuring the ideal points for the Justices of the Philippine Supreme Court for 1986−2010. The Philippines is an interesting case given the US influence in designing the Supreme Court while the political and social context differs significantly. The estimated ideal points allow us to focus on political coalitions based on presidential appointments. We find strong evidence to support the existence of such coalitions along a government-opposition policy space. Implications for comparative judicial politics are discussed.

scholarly journals Birds of the Same Feather Tweet Together: Bayesian Ideal Point Estimation Using Twitter Data

2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pablo Barberá
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Latent Variable ◽  
Ideal Point ◽  
The United States ◽  
Point Estimation ◽  
Potential Contribution ◽  
Online Behavior ◽  
The Social ◽  
Party Registration ◽  
Twitter Users

Politicians and citizens increasingly engage in political conversations on social media outlets such as Twitter. In this article, I show that the structure of the social networks in which they are embedded can be a source of information about their ideological positions. Under the assumption that social networks are homophilic, I develop a Bayesian Spatial Following model that considers ideology as a latent variable, whose value can be inferred by examining which politics actors each user is following. This method allows us to estimate ideology for more actors than any existing alternative, at any point in time and across many polities. I apply this method to estimate ideal points for a large sample of both elite and mass public Twitter users in the United States and five European countries. The estimated positions of legislators and political parties replicate conventional measures of ideology. The method is also able to successfully classify individuals who state their political preferences publicly and a sample of users matched with their party registration records. To illustrate the potential contribution of these estimates, I examine the extent to which online behavior during the 2012 US presidential election campaign is clustered along ideological lines.

scholarly journals Home hours in the United States and Europe

2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lei Fang ◽  
Cara McDaniel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Time Use ◽  
Time Allocation ◽  
The United States ◽  
European Countries ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Using Data

AbstractUsing data from the Multinational Time Use Study, this paper documents the trend and level of time allocation, with a focus on home hours, for the US and European countries. Three patterns emerge. First, home hours per person have declined in both the US and European countries over the past 50 years. Second, female time allocation contributes more to the difference in time allocation per person between the US and European countries than does male time allocation. Third, the time allocation between the US and European countries is more similar for prime-age individuals than for young and old individuals.

scholarly journals The Power of Context in Networks: Ideal Point Models with Social Interactions

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad T. Irfan ◽  
Tucker Gordon
Keyword(s):  
Voting Behavior ◽  
Strategic Behavior ◽  
Ideal Point ◽  
Limited Attention ◽  
Point Model ◽  
Real World Data ◽  
Strategic Behaviors ◽  
Using Data ◽  
Political Spectrum ◽  
The Ideal

Game theory has been widely used for modeling strategic behaviors in networked multiagent systems. However, the context within which these strategic behaviors take place has received limited attention. We present a model of strategic behavior in networks that incorporates the behavioral context, focusing on the contextual aspects of congressional voting. One salient predictive model in political science is the ideal point model, which assigns each senator and each bill a number on the real line of political spectrum. We extend the classical ideal point model with network-structured interactions among senators. In contrast to the ideal point model's prediction of individual voting behavior, we predict joint voting behaviors in a game-theoretic fashion. The consideration of context allows our model to outperform previous models that solely focus on the networked interactions with no contextual parameters. We focus on two fundamental questions: learning the model using real-world data and computing stable outcomes of the model with a view to predicting joint voting behaviors and identifying most influential senators. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model through experiments using data from the 114th U.S. Congress.

scholarly journals The Partisan Mask: Political Orientation, Collectivism, and Religiosity Predict Mask Use During COVID-19

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hohjin Im ◽  
Peiyi Wang ◽  
Chuansheng Chen
Keyword(s):  
State Level ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Orientation ◽  
Third Party ◽  
The Us ◽  
Political Conservatism ◽  
Strong Correlate ◽  
Using Data ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Socioeconomic And Demographic Factors

In the United States, the COVID-19 pandemic became an unconventional vehicle to advance partisan rhetoric and antagonism. Using data available at the individual- (Study 1; N = 4,220), county- (Study 2; n = 3,046), and state-level (n = 49), we found that partisanship and political orientation was a robust and strong correlate of mask use. Political conservatism and Republican partisanship were related to downplaying the severity of COVID-19 and perceiving masks as being ineffective that, in turn, were related to lower mask use. In contrast, we found that counties with majority Democrat partisanship reported greater mask use, controlling for various socioeconomic and demographic factors. Lastly, states with strong cultural collectivism reported greater mask use while those with strong religiosity reported the opposite. States with greater Democrat partisanship and strong cultural collectivism subsequently reported lower COVID-19 deaths, mediated by greater mask use and lower COVID-19 cases, in the five months following the second wave of COVID-19 in the US during the Summer of 2020. Nonetheless, more than the majority for Democrats (91.58%), Republicans (77.52%), and third-party members (82.48%) reported using masks. Implications for findings are discussed.

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